Share Video on YouTube – But Keep Control For Yourself

YouTube and the other video sharing sites are great for getting the word out about your video. It's free, easy to use, and they make it simple for you to embed their version of the video on your own site.

The important thing to note here is that the tradeoff for free hosting is that they control the player. This generally means that they are free to run ads along with your video and direct your visitor to other similar videos when yours is done playing.

This is fine for the vast majority of people are not really trying to control their message.  But if you're trying to control a number of options that your visitor as after a watch your video then this can really screw up your final process.

You work hard to get visitors to your site and you don't want to hand them over to potential competitor.

Hosting Videos Yourself

To control the number of options your visitor has, you need to host the video on your own site, or on disk space you lease from somewhere else.

With the right software, it's pretty easy to convert your video file into something that will play and your site and you can even have a custom player for it.  With flash video you can automatically redirect the visitor to another site once your video is done playing.

The two things to watch out for when hosting your own video are disk and bandwidth usage.  Make sure your hosting plan has enough capacity for your expected traffic.  But even if your hosting plan can accommodate your expected level of traffic it can be worth considering using separate disk space for hosting your videos.

If you rent disk space from somewhere like Amazon S3 or MediaFire your video loading speed won't be dependent on your shared server space.  You won't have to worry about going over your disk or bandwidth usage limits, which could make your site unavailable for some period of time.